Let’s just get this out of the way: most men do not have the same relationship to clothing that women do.
As a rule, the majority of men do not associate important events in their lives with what they were wearing at the time, with the possible exception of marriages or funerals. Women, on the other hand, often have a story to go with a dress, pants, shoes, scarves or bags, all of which call up the threads of memory the same way music can.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that men don’t care about what they wear, because there’s ample evidence that many men do. But, to a greater degree than men, women judge, and are judged, on what they wear. It may not be fair, but such is life.
The late Nora Ephron and her sister Delia Ephron, working from a memoir by Ilene Beckerman called Love, Loss and What I Wore, pulled together a round-robin of stories about women’s fraught relationship with their clothes. The result is a charming cabaret, of the same title, which is being given an entertaining production by the Parish Players at the Eclipse Grange Theater in Thetford.
The stories deal with such milestones in a woman’s life as the onset of puberty, the excruciating ordeal of shopping for a first bra, what girls wore to their first prom, and the age-old cry of “Does this make me look fat?”
The Ephron sisters have also delved into the unbridled lust that women experience when they see a really great pair of boots, the appeal and necessity of basic black, and women’s love affair with shoes, a subject that easily merits its own stage production. With each anecdote, an actor pulls out an article of clothing or looks fondly at a placard showing a drawing of said girl or woman wearing a particular outfit.
You get the picture: this is a light-hearted spin through all the complicated reasons why women attach such importance to what they wear (I know, I know, not all women) or what they see others wearing. It’s part of who they are, part of their identity.
You could call these First World problems, but no matter where women live, what they choose to wear, or are commanded to wear, bears directly on the larger question of how they perceive themselves, and how they are valued by their society.
In one of the anecdotes, titled The Shirt, a woman, played on the night I visited by a very funny Margaret Hunton, mourns the loss of her favorite shirt with the same vivid intensity and, yes, grief, that Red Sox Nation still reserves for Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. I can only say to the woman: I feel your pain.
There are more poignant stories. Kim Meredith tells the anecdote of a girl whose mother dies. When her father remarries, her stepmother happens to wear to breakfast one morning the exact same velour bathrobe that the girl’s mother wore regularly, although in a different color. The girl pointedly remarks on the coincidence, and the step-mother never wears the robe again.
Then there’s Gingy, played by Parish Players regular Kay Morton, who is so in love with love that she trades husbands rather frequently, and can always remember, to the button, what she was wearing when she met the next Mr. Right.
Directed by M. Carl Kaufman, Love, Loss and What I Wore boasts a dandy ensemble of seven actors: apart from Morton, Hunton and Meredith, the cast includes Charlotte Albright (a former reporter for Vermont Public Radio), Darby Hiebert, Rachel Griggs and Jeannie Hines, who alternates the same parts with Hunton on different nights. (On opening night, I saw Hunton.)
Griggs has a natural comedic touch in the parts she plays. Meredith pulls off a tour-de-force with one of the longer stories, I Hate My Purse. The title speaks for itself.
Albright contributes her own story, Upstairs Downstairs, about the ghost relationship she has with a woman who consigns treasured articles of clothing to a second-hand shop, clothes that Albright then buys: Albright doesn’t know who the woman is, but she shares her taste, and imagines what she might be like on the basis of what she wears.
The evening runs two hours. The Ephrons could have kept it to a brisker 90 minutes, and not lost anything. But Kaufman keeps the stories and stage direction moving fluidly along for an amiable and droll night at the theater.
Love, Loss and What I Worecontinues at the Eclipse Grange Theater in Thetford with performances Thursday through Sunday through April 24. All evening performances are at 7:30; Sunday matinees are at 3 p.m. For information and reservations go to parishplayers.org or call 802-785-4344.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.